Serviio

Win 10 64, local SSD.... Serviio 2.3 running fine.

Folders and files are like this:

D:\Music - MP3\Favourites\[alphabetic_sets]\[band_name]\[album]\[tracksXX.mpr]
and
D:\Music - MP3\Favourites\Playlists\[band_name.m3u]

where [alphabetic_sets] just means folders labelled A-C; D-G and so on, to split them up for faster scrolling.

Serviio is set scan D:\Music - MP3
All actual files play fine - if not selected via playlist.

All playlist file entries are in this form:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:312,Back In Black - 01 - 01: Hell's Bells
..\Favourites\A-C\AC-DC\1980 - Back In Black\01 - Hell's Bells.mp3
etc
---- None of these playlists have any content according any client renderer pointed to the Serviio server.

NB....
There are about 115 playlist in the folder. All created with Playlist Creator 3.6.2.
All playlists play perfectly when selected via DLNA/UPNP with Foobar2000, VLC, and my media player (a Cambridge Audio Evo) - all pointed to a Universal Media Player server, or an Emby server on the same PC. The playlists and music files also play perfectly when the same files and folder structures are on my RAID/NAS, which runs Twonky.

If I make a test playlist, and move it a folder above where the music folders are stored, such that the playlist is like this:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:312,Back In Black - 01 - 01: Hell's Bells
Favourites\A-C\AC-DC\1980 - Back In Black\01 - Hell's Bells.mp3
(note "..\" not needed)
... the playlist works.

If simply edit the first mentioned playlist, in the "Playlists" folder to read:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:312,Back In Black - 01 - 01: Hell's Bells
../Favourites/A-C/AC-DC/1980 - Back In Black/01 - Hell's Bells.mp3
(i.e. using forward slashes)
... the playlist works.

To me, given that it is ONLY Serviio that cannot handle playlists using "..\" it looks like a parsing problem. Given that serviio handles "/" in all other cases, and also handles "../" it should be an easy fix, right?

You could say "why not mass edit playlist to change "\" to "/", but then I know other players - such as my car (SD card) will not b able to use the same playlists and I'll have to maintain separate, target device-specific ones which is a pain!

Apologies if I have misunderstood anything about how to set up serviio on Windows....

On my playlist files (both PLS and M3U) I use hard paths to the media, not a relative path. Of course, my media is spread across multiple hard drives, so the hard path is pretty much a requirement for those. I keep my playlist files in a single folder that doesn't contain any of the media files. This way I don't have to go looking for a file when I want to make a change.

I'm traveling this week, so not at home and can't provide any examples of my playlists.

yeah, but using hard paths won't work in many use cases, and I'm basically saying there is a bug, or more kindly, a design oversight in parsing....

Why is it that serviio is the ONLY server that doesn't work correctly for this case?

I can't answer that, since Serviio is the only thing I use with playlists. Plex doesn't support playlist files, and I don't use anything else to stream my media. Hopefully Zip will see your post and provide an answer.

Thanks for looking..

I also use Universal Media Server, Emby (on PC) and Twonky (RAID/NAS on), all of which work fine with the exact same playlists and data.

The thing is, I do like the neatness of Serviio, so getting at least an explanation from Zip as to why my playlist are problematic would be very welcome, even if the "the bug" cannot be fixed or worked-around without me having change my .m3u files to be unique for Serviio!

I guess this is a bug that has an easy work-around for many users (i.e. editing one's playlists), so it's unlikely to be fixed!

Thanks anyway.

Sorry for getting to this so late.

According to my understanding, the relative path would resolve to




No? One up from Playlists, you're inside Favourites, and then back down to Favourites. IMO the relative path in your playlists should be



Or am I completely wrong?